The mystery surrounding Julian Sands’ disappearance takes a new turn. Late Saturday night, US police reported that a group of civilian climbers found human remains around 10am while climbing Mount Baldy, the same one where the 65-year-old British actor disappeared without a trace last January.
According to authorities, the area is close to the Baldy Bowl Trail, which the interpreter walked along and did not return from for more than five months. “Civilian climbers contacted the sheriff’s office [la ciudad de] Fontana following the discovery of human remains in an open-air area of Mount Baldy,” said the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which owns the city of Fontana, which is northeast of the city of Los Angeles, California.
According to the statement, seen by CNN and USA Today, investigators will have a definitive and complete identification of the remains next week.
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Mount Baldy, and in particular the trail called the Baldy Bowl Trail, has always been Sands’ search area, as after his loss, investigators were able to recover certain signals from his cellphone that took him there. All traces of the Brit disappeared by the afternoon of January 13, although it was not until the 19th of the same month that police announced that he was one of two hikers lost in the area on those days. “Sometime that day he went for a walk, and when he didn’t come back, his family reported him missing,” Gloria Huerta, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told the AP agency at the time.
At that time the search for Sands was started, but at that very moment, in January, it had to be stopped due to the bad weather in California, where last year there was a harder and more extreme winter than usual with snowfalls of all kinds. They had seen each other in 40 years. In that time, there have been up to eight rescue operations spanning more than 500 hours to find Sands. In fact, a week ago, on Saturday, June 17, more than 80 volunteer search and rescue workers, police officers, two helicopters and drone crews resumed the task but were unsuccessful at the time. It wasn’t easy either, as it was rainy at the beginning of the year and the onset of summer continues to mean temperatures are milder than usual for the state for this time of year, so much so that in remote areas like this this is not the case in winter.” Many of the areas include steep terrain and ravines with more than three meters of ice and snow remaining on them,” the authorities said in their statement last week. In fact, the family released a statement shortly thereafter: “We continue to carry Julian in our hearts and fondly remember him as a fabulous father, husband, explorer, lover of the outdoors and the arts, and an original and collaborative actor.”
Julian Sands, born 65 years ago in Otley (a small town north of Leeds in the heart of England), has lived for years with his wife, the American writer and journalist Evgenia Citkowitz (a descendant of the famous and Guinness millionaire), whom he married in 1990 and with whom he has two daughters; In addition, he has an older son, Henry, who was born in the mid-1980s from a previous marriage. Sands has always had a passion for the mountains and that is why California was a paradise for him as mountain walks and hiking are a pleasure for thousands of Angelenos and Californians.
The actor, known for his roles in A Room With a View (1985), Warlock (1989) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995), as well as series such as 24 and Smallville (where he played Superman’s father) is not known in the mountain. In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian in 2020, he already told that he went into a trance in the mountains three decades ago and feared for his life: “In the early nineties, in the Andes, when we were trapped in a terrible 20,000ft storm with three others,” he said. “We were all very bad. Some people close to us died; we were very lucky.”